Business Continuity Management for Banking Operations Training Course

Course overview

Banking operations cannot wait for a disruption to become a crisis. Payment cut-off failures, core banking outages, cyber incidents, loss of a processing site, third-party service interruptions and staff unavailability can rapidly affect customer access, regulatory obligations, liquidity activity and market confidence. Business continuity managers and operational leaders need more than a generic recovery plan: they need a tested, evidence-based approach for identifying critical banking services, setting recovery priorities and coordinating decisions under pressure.

This course teaches participants how to build and maintain a business continuity management system for banking operations. Participants conduct business impact analysis for services such as payments, card operations, loan processing, branch services, treasury support and AML/KYC operations; establish recovery time and recovery point objectives; map dependencies on applications, data, facilities, people and outsourced providers; and design practical continuity and recovery strategies. The course also addresses crisis governance, incident escalation, regulator-facing evidence, exercising arrangements and measuring programme performance against ISO 22301 requirements.

Delivery combines instructor-led modules with banking disruption scenarios, structured workshops and practical templates. Participants work through a simulated disruption affecting payment processing and a critical third-party provider, making service-prioritisation, communications and recovery decisions. They leave with a bank-specific business continuity action plan containing a service criticality assessment, BIA inputs, dependency map, exercise design and improvement roadmap that can be adapted for their own function.

The course is designed for practitioners who already work with operational risk, resilience, technology recovery, facilities, security or regulated banking operations and need to convert continuity policy into workable operational arrangements.

Course objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:

• Conduct a banking business impact analysis using service criticality, impact categories and recovery requirements
• Define recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives and minimum service levels for critical banking operations
• Map operational dependencies across people, premises, technology, data, utilities and third-party providers
• Design continuity strategies for payment operations, customer channels, branch services and back-office processing
• Create an incident escalation and crisis-management structure with defined decision rights and communications routes
• Develop ISO 22301-aligned business continuity plans, recovery procedures and plan-maintenance controls
• Run a tabletop exercise using injects, decision logs, observer criteria and post-exercise corrective actions
• Produce a prioritised continuity improvement roadmap with owners, milestones, assurance evidence and management reporting

Benefits of attending

Target competencies

Who should attend

• Business Continuity Managers — who must design, test and improve continuity arrangements across banking functions
• Operational Risk Managers — who need to assess disruption exposure and challenge resilience controls
• Banking Operations Managers — who are accountable for maintaining critical customer and transaction services
• IT Service Continuity and Disaster Recovery Managers — who must align technology recovery with business recovery priorities
• Third-Party Risk and Vendor Managers — who need to evaluate continuity dependencies in outsourced banking services
• Information Security and Crisis Management Professionals — who coordinate operational response during cyber and major incidents

Requirements and prerequisites

Participants should understand the basic structure of banking operations and be familiar with their organisation's critical services, escalation routes or operational-risk processes. Experience in one of the following is useful: business continuity, operational risk, IT service management, incident management, internal audit, facilities resilience or supplier oversight. Participants should be able to read process maps and work with simple spreadsheet-based assessments. No prior ISO 22301 certification, disaster recovery technical expertise, coding ability or specialist continuity software experience is required. A complete beginner to banking operations should first gain familiarity with payment, customer-service and back-office process flows.

Training methodology

The course uses short instructor-led sessions to introduce ISO 22301 concepts, banking recovery requirements and operational resilience controls, followed by guided application. Participants analyse a simulated bank's payment, branch and outsourced-processing dependencies in small groups, complete BIA and recovery-priority worksheets, and respond to timed incident injects. Facilitated reviews compare alternative recovery decisions and their customer, regulatory and financial consequences. On the final day, each participant converts workshop outputs into a function-specific continuity improvement plan with named actions, owners and evidence requirements.

Course outline

Day 1: Banking continuity foundations and service criticality

• Business continuity management system structure under ISO 22301:2019
• Banking operational resilience versus business continuity management
• Critical business services in payments, cards, lending and customer channels
• Disruption scenarios affecting banking operations and customer access
• Continuity governance, policy ownership and accountable executive roles
• Impact categories including customer harm, regulatory breach, financial loss and reputational damage
• Service criticality criteria and tolerance-setting principles

Workshop: Participants classify a simulated bank's services by criticality and produce a service-priority matrix with stated impact assumptions.

Day 2: Business impact analysis and dependency mapping

• BIA scope definition by service, process, location and legal entity
• Recovery time objective and recovery point objective calculation
• Minimum business continuity objective and minimum service level definition
• Manual workaround capacity and transaction-backlog analysis
• People, skills and key-person dependency assessment
• Application, data, infrastructure and telecommunications dependency mapping
• Third-party, cloud, utility and correspondent-bank dependency analysis

Workshop: Participants complete a BIA worksheet for a disrupted payments process and produce a dependency map showing recovery constraints.

Day 3: Recovery strategies and operational continuity plans

• Strategy selection using cost, feasibility, risk reduction and recovery capability criteria
• Alternative site, remote-working and split-team continuity arrangements
• Manual processing controls for payments and customer-service operations
• Data recovery, reconciliation and transaction-repair requirements
• Technology recovery alignment with business recovery priorities
• Business continuity plan architecture and role-based action checklists
• Third-party continuity clauses, evidence requests and service recovery commitments

Workshop: Participants design a recovery strategy for a core payments outage and produce a role-based continuity plan extract.

Day 4: Crisis management, communications and exercising

• Incident classification, activation thresholds and escalation criteria
• Crisis-management team roles, decision rights and meeting cadence
• Customer, regulator, staff and supplier communication protocols
• Decision logs, situation reports and incident action tracking
• Tabletop exercise objectives, scope, injects and success criteria
• Observer guides, evidence capture and exercise evaluation methods
• Corrective-action registers and lessons-learned governance

Workshop: Participants conduct a tabletop exercise involving a cyber-related payments disruption and produce a decision log and corrective-action register.

Day 5: Assurance, metrics and implementation planning

• ISO 22301 internal audit evidence and management review inputs
• Continuity plan maintenance cycles and change-management triggers
• Key risk indicators and key performance indicators for continuity programmes
• Testing schedules for plans, recovery sites, applications and suppliers
• Control assurance across first line, second line and internal audit
• Board and risk-committee reporting on continuity readiness
• Prioritised business continuity improvement roadmap development

Workshop: Participants assemble a 90-day continuity improvement roadmap for their own function, including actions, owners, milestones and assurance evidence.

Tools & standards covered

ISO 22301:2019, ISO 22317:2021, ServiceNow Business Continuity Management, Microsoft Excel

A typical training day

Live online deliveries follow the same structure in the East Africa Time zone, with shorter screen blocks and longer breaks.

What the fee includes

How you can take this course

Certification

Participants who complete the full five days receive the Skillset Development Certificate of Completion, stating the course title, course code, dates and delivery format — suitable for professional-development records and employer reimbursement.

Frequently asked questions